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Tile Fine Arts are out of town for the season. No amplitude of silken skirts disturbs the dust on the scorching stairs of the Royal Academy portico, and solitude sits brooding on that bench in the passage of the Water Colour Society, dedicated during the three months of the fashionable year to the footmen, whilst their master and mistress are enjoying Mr. Hunt's chickens and mushrooms and fraft, up-stairs. All the pictures are dispersed to the houses of their authors or purchasers, or to the several pro- vincial exhibitions. The only annual exhibition which still delights the eyes of the few lingerinab Londoners is that of the old masters in the British Institution, and even there—noble as the pictures are— neither the genius of Reynolds, Rubens, nor Rembrandt attracts more than two or three stray worshippers of those great artists. Gone also are their painters and purchasers, and probably their critics as well. One of them at least—the " Dry Point" of this journal— is temporarily absent, and has arranged privately with the writer of these words to supply his place this week. The few notes of this week, therefore, will be as scattered as art and artists just now are, and I must bear my burden like Ariel's sprites, "dispersedly."

to the National Gallery first, where activity is the order of the day. .A roaring fire blazes in the entrance-hall to hasten the drying of Mr. Pennethorne's new walls, and during the closing of the gallery (which will be for one month only, instead of six weeks, as usual) it is intended to hang the large room with Turner's pictures, pending the erection of suitable rooms for their reception at the back of the second room where the archaic examples are now placed. Late last week, five new works were hung, three acquired by purchase from Mr. Barker, and two presented by painters. These two are gift-horses, that may

be looked in the mouth without the donors winrinz Four of them are hung on the right wall immediately on entering, and are num- bered 666, 667, 668, 669. The first two are by Filippo Lippi, and the first is the gift of Sir Charles Eastlake. It is an Annunciation, and especially charming in colour. The other is a St. John Baptist

with six other saints, also very beautiful in colour, though less so than the first. The third acquisition, 668, is evidently a compart-

ment of an altar-piece, and represents the Beato Ferretti kneeling in

adoration to a vision of the Virgin and Child in the aureole seen in the sky; behind him is a tree with a goldfinch on it, and a back-

ground of rocky landscape and a church; on the left of the picture

a duck and duckling swim in a pool. There is good expression in the kneeling friar, but the gallery already possesses a better, example of the painter Carlo Crivelli. 669 is the only example here of its author, G. B. Benvenuti, nicknamed L'Ortolano, a painter of the Ferrarese School. It represents the Saints Sebastian, Roch, and Demetrius, and is on all accounts a decided gain to the collection.

St. Sebastian stands in the centre, his hands bound by cords to a tree- trunk, his body transfixed by four arrows; his countenance has great expression and beauty. To the left is St. Roch, also handsome and

young, clothed in a yellow tunic, blue mantle, and brown stockings ; at his feet a bag and rush-covered bottle, probably to denote his

wealth, and the succour he gave to the plague-stricken. To the right of the spectator stands the patron of Salonica, a thoughtful-looking, middle-aged man, resting his head on his left hand, and leaning the right on a gold-hilted sword; he is in rich armour splendidly painted, and a red mantle is flung on his shoulders. This last figure is parti- cularly fine. The treatment of the figures is realistic, and the light and shade has the force of the Ferrarese School. I believe this and the two previously named works were in the Collection of Old Masters at the British Institution, 1858.

But Mr. Watts, the painter, has given, in 670, A Knight of Malta, the best of these additions. The gallery already has, in 649, a splendid

specimen, though inferior to Mr. Watts's gift, of the powers of the

painter Jacopo da Pontormo, who will be remembered by readers of Vasari as having lent his buddina° talent to that memorable Floren-

tine procession in which BaccioBanclinelli and the historian Nardi (who were old enough to have known better) managed to kill a baker's boy by treating him like a bit of gingerbread, and sending him naked and gilt.all over to beautify the inaugurative festa of that nice pope Leo the Tenth. It might have been remorse for having been innocently connected with this piece of idiotic cruelty that caused Pontormo, in after years, to refuse to work for another

member of the same patriotic family. This Knight of Malta, a life- sized portrait of a handsome dark man, clothed in black from head to

foot, his right hand resting on a book which is on a library table of

carved golden coloured wood, and his left hand planted on his hip, is a masterpiece, a clef-d'muvre, a cape d'opera, whatever term that

expresses first-rate in any language that you like, and is worthy of a better place than it occupies at present above the line on the right hand wall of the new large room.

Quitting the National Gallery, and Lippi's John Baptist seated between Saints Cosmo and Damian, with their lancets and infini- tesimal medicine-chests that look like gold snuff-boxes, a strong smell of cosmetics leads me throughCovent-garden Market, past Drury- lane Theatre, into Lincoln's Inn-fields, and so into the Insolvent Debtors' Court, Portugal-street, where female art, in the person of an infant "Enameller of Ladies' Faces" seeks protection. Like the Prince of Denmark, I have heard of the ladies' paintings, too, par-

ticularly from the lively and sensible feuilletoniste of L' Illustra- tion, M. Feyrnet, and I have seen them, too, more than w ell enough, behind black-spotted veils which some of my countrywomen put on, as ostriches pnt their heads in the sand, thinking to escape detection. But it won't do. And I beg to assure these respectable young ladies, and their Belgravian mothers, who have been winking and nodding at this folly seventy times harder than the Seven Sleepers, that one of the reasons why the husbands are not forthcoming is, that they have a sharp sight, and seeing this stupid and clumsy attempt to deceive, suspect other stupidities and deceptions which may not exist.

Let me have a breath of fresh air and a draught of pure water to get rid of this musty fusty insolvency atmosphere and cloud of violet powder. A new Recreation Ground and Drinking Fountain were opened last Saturday at Reading for the supply of both these good things, and the speaker of the day said that the fountain had cost the donor upwards of a hundred pounds. It is to be hoped that for his outlay he got some mood art, which does not always come at the bidding of love and money. Thousands have been spent on drink- ing fountains, and we have scores of them in London alone ; but those in which fitness and beauty are, and where vanity and misapplied Scripture are not, may be counted on the fingers. .'One of the few elegant ones, and I should think one of the cheapest, is a mural fountain in Della Robbia ware close to the tennis-court in Hampton Court Gardens. The design is graceful an, the colour good, with the exception of a light blue that is never seen in Robbia ware or is

the decorative' art of any nation with an eye for colour. In Chinese, Japanese, and mediaeval art, all the light blues partake of a green tint when they are used as a ground colour, as in parts of this foun- tain.

Whilst on the subject of Della Robbia ware, I would remind in- tending Italian tourists who may be visiting Florence—where Victor Emanuel opens an Industrial Exhibition in the Casein on the 15th of September—that the little town of Prato, about ten miles from the city on the Pistoja railway, has some capital art of this kind in one of its churches, consisting of four medallions, with the evangelists and a frieze of fruit. It is curious that Mr. Street, and our other young architects who have introduced fancy brickwork as a result of their Italian studies, should have left Sgraffitto work and Della Robbia ware—this last better calculated for a London atmosphere than any other kind of decorative art—untried. Perhaps both of them smack too much of " pestilential Renaissance" to please Mr. Ruskin's disciples ; yet master and pupils would acknowledge pro- bably that certain exterior walls in Or' San Michele and Via Maggio are more beautiful and interesting than those of All Saints, Mar- garet-street.

Mr. Mayan has just issued afresh set of tiny portraits of the Royal Family, which are an improvement upon those published last year. Photography makes a wide gap in the divine hedge of royalty now-a- days, and emperors and empresses are to be seen "in the Strand," as the street song of the hour goes, side by side with Blondin, dressed in no better clothes, and not a whit handsomer than the rope-idol.

Delightful Antwerp has had an Art Congress this week, and the foremost among its foreign professional guests has been Sir Edwin Landseer. Mr. David Roberts, too, to whom the churches of the city have been a mine of wealth, was present with a few more Royal Academicians and English artists.

W.-P.